Landscape with Haymakers

Using two joined sheets of paper, Simon de Vlieger created a panoramic landscape of expansive space, contrasting textures, and varied rhythms. De Vlieger captured the land's erosion in striking, lyrical curves that take up nearly half the composition and provide an almost abstract pattern and visual rhythm. Above the land rise the soft, feathery trees whose texture contrasts with the earth's smoothness. Their strong, stable vertical thrust helps to balance the winding waves below. De Vlieger also balanced the left and right sides of the drawing, juxtaposing the trees' great height and the mound on which they stand with the wide vista of the town beyond.

The field sloping down to the left around which a wooded road curves, the stretch of earth eroded into wavelike mounds, and the snaking river in the distance also appear in de Vlieger's Wooded Landscape with Sleeping Peasants: Parable of the Sower in the Cleveland Museum of Art.